The sugar industry used Big Tobacco-techniques

The American Heart Association is recommending that children, ages 2 to 18, should consume no more than six teaspoons of added sugars in their daily diets.

The American Heart Association is recommending that children, ages...

A team of UCSF scientists has uncovered news that could have a huge impact on the American diet. For decades, the sugar industry has attempted — with great success — to exonerate sugar as a heart-threatening substance. The industry was able to do this because it funded the research that shaped major public health discussions.

Today, the American Heart Association has acknowledged the link between high sugar consumption and heart disease. Public health advocates are increasingly sounding the alarm about the risks of sugar, especially in the form of sugar-sweetened beverages. The message is slowly getting through. Berkeley passed a soda tax in 2014. San Francisco tried to pass a soda tax in 2014 — an effort that went down after the American Beverage Association spent $10 million to defeat it. This year, San Francisco is trying again.

But the incredible amounts of money being spent to defeat sugar-sweetened beverage taxes at the ballot suggest the tactics of another industry: Big Tobacco. Given the evidence that the UCSF scientists published on Monday, the comparison isn’t far off.

The sugar industry was aware of evidence linking too much sugar to heart disease as early as the early 1960s. Its response was to embark on what a Sugar Research Foundation official called a “major program” to blame another culprit, namely fat. The foundation sponsored research by Harvard scientists that accused cholesterol and fat of causing heart disease — not sugar.

There was no disclosure that the research was paid for by the sugar industry. The research was published in prestigious journals that influence other scientists and the National Institutes of Health.

Not coincidentally, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave sugar a pass for decades. And Americans struggled to stick with low-fat diets throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Americans’ per capita consumption of sugar skyrocketed. Obesity rates grew.

The UCSF researchers emphasized that they weren’t trying to link sugar with heart disease — only to shed light on the process by which an industry can influence the scientific process.

But the process is incriminating enough. The public has every right to feel misled — and to take every other bit of information from this industry with a grain of not sugar but salt.